We agree that alpha channel and animations are required features for any next-gen image format, but that doesn't change the analysis. It doesn't make sense to try to get WebP support everywhere for those features or for small compression gains, when in a couple of years or less we could introduce a new format with those features and big compression gains.

The reason we're not merging WebP in a hurry is because it's not very good. The study results linked to in the article show that WebP isn't much better than mozjpeg. (This is especially clear in the second part of the study where mozjpeg is tuned for SSIM.) On the other hand the study shows HEVC *is* much better than WebP/mozjpeg, so we know a much better format than WebP is technically available *now*. We can't simply adopt HEVC as is due to patent licensing issues, but we should be able to create an unencumbered format with similar or better performance (e.g. using VP9 or Daala as a base). It doesn't seem like a good idea to try to move to WebP when we know a better format is coming fairly soon (probably within a couple of years).

Brendan knew about this and approved of it long ago. Carry on dreaming.

We at Mozilla do not regard popularity as an end in itself. Instead, we regard it as an essential part of our strategy for executing on our mission. The amount of influence we have to make the Internet better is, in many spheres, proportional to Firefox market share.

As to whether we'd lose users due to Netflix, Hulu etc eventually not working in Firefox ... nobody seriously doubts this.

Brad Kuhn misquotes Mitchell. She did not say "an approach", she said "MozillaÃ(TM)s fundamental approach".

Funny, as a Mozilla employee I feel much more bullied --- by both sides of the culture war --- than bullying.

It feels like someone smacked us in the side of the head, we fell over, and then someone else came along shouting "weaklings!" and kicked us on the ground.

Certainly, in hindsight, it was a mistake to promote Brendan to CEO. But without hindsight, very few people can honestly say they saw this coming. Before this blew up, no-one was openly saying "OK, no-one on the pro-Prop-8 donation list can be a CEO in California now unless they publicly repent or the company is willing to take major damage". In fact AFAICT a large majority of people, even in California, were surprised and somewhat horrified to find out that's the case.

As CTO, co-founder, and linchpin of Mozilla for all 16 years of its existence, not to mention creator of Javascript, Brendan was already as "public face" and "guiding force" as he was going to be as CEO. That's what bugs me about the whole "public face" argument.

I said he was not coerced or pushed out *by Mozilla*. No way does that imply a free pass to the lobby groups that hounded him out of the job.

Jessica Klein and Jess Klein are the same person.

Christie Koehler doesn't belong on your list. She early and publicly supported Brendan as CEO --- a stand that made her quite unpopular with a segment of her LGBT community. She deserves great praise.

We did not "stand by and watch". Many Mozilla staff made public statements supporting Brendan as CEO, including (courageously) many LGBT Mozilla staff. Many more publicly supported Brendan than publicly opposed him. The media of course focused on his opponents because "Mozilla employees call for CEO to step down" gets more clicks than "Mozilla employees support CEO".

Maybe we could have done more. At the time the firestorm was hot enough that it was unclear whether speaking out (and what sort of speaking out) would help. Brendan's resignation came as a great surprise to almost everyone at Mozilla, including me, and up to then I honestly thought simply saying nothing and letting the controversy blow itself out was going to work and was the best course of action.

To all the people who are shouting about "free speech" now: did you speak up to support Mozilla while we were defending Brendan as CEO? If not, why are you more enthusiastic about bashing us now than you were about supporting us back then?

That is totally absurd. If the board didn't want Brendan to be CEO, they wouldn't have appointed him in the first place!

The evidence is clear that the board, and almost everyone else at Mozilla, wanted Brendan as CEO. Then came the protests, the social media firestorm, and the boycotts, and he stepped down (and was not "kicked out").

If you believe differently from what's indicated by the observable facts and official statements, produce some evidence. No-one has so far.

You should know very well that more justifications have been proposed than "it's gross". You may have good arguments against those justifications but what you have presented here is a pretty pathetic straw-man.

Those of us at Mozilla who haven't quit over this --- which is, as far as I know, all of us --- believe that pursuing our mission of the open Web is more important than quitting to express our disgust. And I think Brendan believes that too.

Sticking with Mozilla for the sake of our mission, in the face of all this turmoil, requires great strength of character, and I am proud to say that Mozillians have been demonstrating that in spades. Making angry comments on the Internet, on the other hand, requires no strength of character at all.

CSS Variables are actually better described as CSS Custom Properties. They aren't just SASS-style global macros, they're far more powerful. Different elements can have different values for the same custom property, and custom property values set on an element are inherited by its descendants, respecting dynamic DOM changes etc. Custom property values can be set dynamically by scripts and those changes are of course automatically inherited.

Air-gap alone is not enough. Stuxnet travelled via USB sticks. And if your hardware (or anything connected to it) has a wireless interface on it (Bluetooth, Wifi, etc), you have a problem ... an operator might bring a hacked phone within range, for example.

Simplifying the hardware down to fixed-function IC or analog reduces the attack surface much more than attempts to isolate the hardware from the Internet.